Day after day, as I cleaned the spittoons (three-pound coffee cans, actually) and mopped the foul floor, my mind was occupied by a sustained effort to discover, through the application of the most rigorous logic, a theory to account for my presence in a world where my presence is impossible. (This was after my parole from the state hospital, after I had achieved a measure of resignation to my plight.) The initial stages of my analysis were simple enough: I postulated that any occurrence, anywhere, anytime, is a cause that has a consequent effect. A major occurrence has a major effect and changes history. Now, from the beginning, history has been an infinity of forks in a road, with the road not taken disappearing forever after it is passed, so that a backward look shows only a single thoroughfare stretching to the rear. But suppose that somehow, from our present position on this thoroughfare, a barricade could be hurled backward, back to one of those forks in the road, compelling events to travel on the alternative route. As time went by, and fork after fork came and went, a retrospective survey of the route taken would not show that the main road was missed long ago. It would not show that we now travel on a detour, a sad, sick, degenerate, abominable detour. But the main road is still there, is still there. I think logic dictates that we must believe it is still there.
The exercise of pure reason had brought me to that point, but there my search for the truth began to appear to be almost hopeless. Reduced to essentials, it had become a search for the villain. Someone had erected the barricade that shunted history into the detour and exiled me from the main road to this wretched byway, and whoever he was, he had to be found and compelled to undo his villainy. But the world is a big place, containing a very considerable number of people, and I had not the least vague clue to his identity. A mad scientist? A military secret project? A lama spinning a prayer wheel in Tibet?
My problem was further complicated by the fact that I am not permitted to leave town. The people at the state hospital have decreed that I must be brought in once a month to be questioned and tested, presumably for reassurance that I can safely continue to be farmed out to the Top Hat Bar and Grill. I gather that before my incarceration I sometimes did violent things. (When I compare my mashed-in face with the way I used to look, I can believe it.) Okie Perkins, Prop. of the Top Hat Bar and Grill, drives me to these monthly vettings, where I steadfastly maintain silence despite the often ingenious subterfuges the headshrinkers use to get me to talk. I have promised myself that I shall speak no word until I am back where I belong. Obviously this vow was a further impediment to my investigation.
But I had some good luck, which served me as well as cold reason and sedulous research could have done. I found Loob. At some point in my despairing prowlings through the town, I became aware of him, and I came gradually to realize that I had found the culprit. It was no blazing revelation, or anything of that sort; but as soon as I began to suspect him I undertook to weigh his qualifications as a suspect against the indisputable facts, and, little by little, it became perfectly plain that it was indeed Loob who had done this unspeakable thing. I matched the history of the town – one history until 1905, and then two, both of which I had pondered obsessively – with what I knew about Loob, and at last the whole grim story was laid out for me.
I said that finding him was good luck, but it was bad luck as well, because my plan to compel an undoing of the evil has come to nothing; quite clearly there is no way to compel Loob to do anything at all. There is not even any way to talk to him – which I would be eager to do if he could understand. But he cannot talk, and so certain portions of the story must remain forever conjecture. But they fit the facts, the whole thing coheres.
So now I watch him and wait for the day when he will undo what he did. Because there is nothing to do but watch and wait. And (I cannot help it) hope. I stalk him through the town, willing him to go to the house, to sit in the window. That is where he must be to change things back. When he is in the house, I usually lurk somewhere outside, not because I can affect what may happen, but simply out of an unexplainable feeling that I should be there. And then, too, looking at the house can sometimes evoke my real life so strongly that for a moment I forget where I am.
The house, my grandmother’s house in the real world. A mansion with many chimneys, enduringly built of the pale-gray local sandstone, still displaying a basic elegance of line and proportion. Its walls remain as stout as the day they were built, and the slates of the roof still turn the rain; but there is no glass in any window, nor a door in any doorway, and the winds sweep through, blowing dust and trash in squalid patterns across the floor. There are no rooms on the first story; the interior walls were torn out years ago and replaced by a number of steel poles to bear the weight of the upper floors. In the cavernous space thus created, a foredoomed machine shop had existed precariously for a few years before it sank into bankruptcy and abandoned its worn-out lathes and drills to the scavengers and vandals. This is where Loob likes to be.
He likes to sit on a box in one of the oriel windows. From there he looks down to the river, across the junk piles and weeds that were once a smooth lawn sloping to the edge of the woods, across the rusty railroad tracks and decaying sheds that stand where great trees grew in the days when the house was in history’s mainstream. He sits there for a large part of almost every day, watching an inconstant landscape: seeing sometimes a squirm of rats among frozen weeds, sometimes a small giggling girl frolicking with a patient dog on a summer lawn, sometimes other things. Loob feels no curiosity about these alterations of the view. Most things in life are incomprehensible to him, and all phenomena are equally unexpected and equally unsurprising. But the little girl engages somewhat more of his attention than do the rats; the pretty lady at the piano is marginally more interesting than a ruined milling machine. Loob is happier (if that is the word for the viscid stirring within him) when he is watching the past.
During all the eighteen years of his life the past has been his milieu as often as the present. He does not distinguish between them. Some things can be touched and some cannot; that is one of the things he knows, and it is his sole perception of the difference between past and present. His questing hand will pass through the piano but be arrested by the milling machine; neither occurrence surprises him. If the piano were suddenly to become palpable and the milling machine insubstantial, he would not remember that it had ever been otherwise.
He answers to “Loob,” short for “Loober,” which is as close as he can come to pronouncing Luther. His name is another of the things he knows. Boys used to use that fact to bait him.
“Hey, Loob. What’s your name, Loob?”
“Loo – ber.” Thick, slow, forced out after a struggle.
Laughter. “Make him do it again.”
“What’s your name, Loob?”
“Loo – ber.”
And laughter again. But now he has grown to several inches over six feet and weighs three hundred pounds. They no longer tease him. He has never been known to harm anyone, but his size and appearance have emancipated him from the role of butt. When he walks in the streets now, they say, “Hi, Loob,” or even, “Hello, Luther.” All of the people here know each other. A stranger may say, “My God, what’s that?” and someone will tell him, “Oh, that’s Luther Rankin. One of our village idiots. Perfectly harmless.”
The speaker will be mistaken; Loob is anything but perfectly harmless. He can do – has done – abominable things, as no one knows better than I. But he has not done them with malice; he has not intended harm. He has never in his life intended anything at all and indeed is incapable of having intentions. The abominations happened simply because Loob is what he is; they came about as suddenly, and with as little premeditation, as the collapse of a river bank in a flood. But it is because of Loob that the house is what it is. That the town is what it is.
For three quarters of a century the town has been dying. At the turn of the century it passed almost overnight from its lusty prime into senescence, but ever since it has clun
g with a kind of weak tenacity to a spark of life, and now, shrunken and listless, it squats and decays on its mountainside, still housing in decrepit grimy dwellings a few hundred dispirited clients of the welfare system. Trains still make runs along the track that winds down the valley beside the river, but it has been many years since the train has stopped here, and the town’s name on the depot has almost weathered away. A new interstate highway carries most of the traffic that formerly used the river road, and the town’s last filling station stands boarded up at the corner where Main Street meets the road. There are only two stores left, and one saloon. The school has been abandoned, and all but one of the churches. It is a town without hope and without pride, a place with no reason for existing except to provide shelter of a sort for people who are themselves without hope or pride.
Once long ago it was a prosperous confident town, whose citizens believed it might one day rival Pittsburgh. It was not a wholly impossible vision. The Dappling Iron Works, which had grown prodigiously during the Civil War, leagued itself with the railroads when the war ended, and if Henry Dappling had been another kind of man, he might have pushed himself into the company of Carnegie and Frick and made his town a city like theirs. But he was not driven by ambition, and his factory and his town in the first years of the new century were exactly as he wanted them to be: healthy, bustling, productive – and of manageable size. He was comfortable in his role as First Citizen and Squire, and he approved of a community that was not too large for every citizen to know him and know his position. He liked the town as it was, and he liked his own position within it.
He took a keen pleasure in his daily trip to the plant, the ceremony and style of it. Every morning at eight, his polished buggy passed between the gateposts of the estate and proceeded briskly into town along Dappling Road, Dappling portly and erect in the seat, snugly buttoned into well-tailored sober broadcloth, in firm control of a team of matched chestnuts. There were no doffed hats or tugged forelocks as he passed, but those who shouted good morning to him called him Mr. Dappling.
Dappling Road curved around a hill and sloped downward to meet Main Street; Dappling’s house was in fact quite near the town, but hidden from it by the cheek of the hill. At Main Street he turned left, down into the town, past houses that became progressively larger as he approached the square. The block nearest the square had mansions on both sides of the street, large dark buildings of brick or stone, heavily ginger-breaded, standing at the backs of deep lawns. These were the homes of Dappling’s superintendents and the banker and the most prosperous of the merchants. The retail commerce of the town took place around the square, and most of the merchants contrived to be at their doors to greet Dappling as the buggy passed smartly by. He returned to each a sober inclination of the head, a nod calculated precisely to indicate relative social positions. On the lower side of the square was another block of fine houses, and then the row houses of the mill workers down to the wrought-iron gates of the Dappling Iron Works.
In the cobbled courtyard, McVay would be waiting to take the horses, a lean grim mountaineer with a crooked leg. The leg had been crippled in a mill accident, and because McVay had a family, a job as hostler and janitor had been found for him. If he had been killed, his widow would have received a small sum every payday until the oldest boy was old enough to work in the mill. When a mill hand grew too old or too infirm to work, the son or son-in-law who took him in found his pay envelope somewhat augmented each week for so long as the old man lived. No one starved in Dappling’s town. No one had any luxuries, either, except for the people in the big houses on Main Street. And Dappling.
The townspeople were content with that arrangement. They were proud, illiterate people who made a point of asking for no more than they felt they had earned, and they were in fact more prosperous and lived more comfortably (if perhaps with a little less freedom) than their cousins who lived in mountain cabins. They were all people indigenous to the mountains, some still owning steep remnants of the land granted to ancestors in recognition of service as soldiers in the Revolution. There were no foreigners in Dappling’s mill. He had observed with fastidious disgust the consequences of Pittsburgh’s resort to immigrant labor: the swarms of evil-smelling clownish peasants, gabbling in strange tongues and devouring loathsome foods, creating squalid enclaves that reproduced with hideous fidelity the degenerate East European or Mediterranean villages that had spawned them. Dappling would have none of it. Who would be squire where the tenants were the likes of these?
No, he would forego becoming a great man, if becoming a great man entailed such things. In his lifetime, at least, things would not change here. This neat prospering town where dwelt contented respectful citizens; this bustling profitable mill where free Americans labored; these wooded hills surrounding his elegant great house: these were what he prized; these he would keep. These and his family.
His days were so ordered that there was time for each of them: he would be in his office (he still called it a counting house, a small room darkly furnished in mahogany and green plush) until noon precisely, sitting deliberate and magisterial behind the broad desk, guiding the affairs of his mill with a concentration of attention indistinguishable from love. That part of his life that belonged to the mill was the mill’s absolutely. But with the first sound of the noon whistle he was at the door, and before the sound of the whistle had died the chestnuts were in motion, retracing the morning’s journey. With the closing of the door, Dappling shut business out of his mind until tomorrow; the rest of the day belonged to the estate and the family.
He always felt a lift in his spirits as the buggy approached the gates of the manor, an emotion identical with the one he felt as he neared the mill in the morning. Twice each day on six days of the week he enjoyed this feeling of pleasurable anticipation. He relished each morning’s work, the solid satisfaction of bringing order to confused situations, the pride in his honest profit from his honest product. He relished equally the afternoons: a farmer’s lunch, a change into boots and breeches, and then into the outdoors – sometimes afoot and sometimes riding – to verify that all went well with his acres.
There were about twenty thousand of them, forest mostly, lofty virgin stands of oak and walnut steeply rising above valleys where swift cold streams ran. Where the land was reasonably flat, there were wheat and cornfields, and on steeper clearings grew lush pasturage for the fat cattle and blooded horses that won ribbons for Dappling at the fair. He liked to take his big gray gelding on a tour of the fields on a summer afternoon, using not the farm roads but his private bridle paths, cantering through the silent forest on a crooked course that took him from the stable down to the fat fields of the bottomland, thence upward as far as the high mountain meadow, and from there back again to his house in the last hour before sunset. He would emerge from the trees at the top of the home meadow, whose long slope ran from the edge of the woods down to Dappling Road. There he always pulled up to absorb the view for a few minutes: in the foreground the dairy herd making its way in a peaceable file towards the barn for the evening milking; then the road; and then, beyond treetops, his house, solid, permanent, and shapely, on its broad expanse of lawn. The best part of the day was still to come. If the gelding was not overheated, Dappling would give him his head and, with deliberate theatricality, thunder up to the stable at a dead run. More often than not, Emily would be there waiting for him.
His Emily, his sunshine; the radiance that lighted his life, the small granddaughter whom he loved with an intensity of devotion that sometimes – as he was well aware – made him appear faintly ridiculous. He doted; and was aware that his doting was a cause of laughter, and did not care, this staid industrialist who prized his dignity above most things. He saw in this merry child a recreation of her grandmother, the adored wife who had died young and whose loss inflicted a wound that had remained as raw as the day it was new through all the years until Emily’s birth.
He had remained fond enough of his son Sam and never
been so unhinged by grief as to blame the boy because his birth had killed his mother; nonetheless, he had been more a dutiful than a loving father. But if he did not cheer at Sam’s triumphs, neither did he chide him for his failures, and they did not quarrel. They did not embrace, either, and Sam no more filled the empty part of Dappling’s life than did the mill and the estate. All three were good things, important to him and sources of satisfaction, but it was not until the baby’s birth that they fell snugly into place as parts of a life that seemed now to be whole and unflawed. He was able at last to love Sam as a son and to become fond of Sam’s wife Olivia, the aristocrat Sam had fetched home to the mountains from a decaying Main Line mansion.
Sam, for his part, not only loved his father, he admired him above all men. He accounted himself very lucky, did plain decent Sam, with the great Henry Dappling his father and the beautiful Olivia his wife. Sam knew his limitations, knew that his father and his wife had quicker, keener minds than his own. At Harvard, where his father had been graduated cum laude after an indolent and sociable four years, Sam had had to toil mightily for his Gentleman’s Cs, and he was never able to comprehend at all the formidable books that his wife incessantly read. But what he learned he remembered, and Dappling was a patient teacher. Sam had come to be of value in the mill and on the farm, and when the proper time came round (in ten years, Dappling thought, or fifteen), he would be fit to command both. His ways were not his father’s ways, but Dappling had gradually come to realize that Sam’s pleasant, almost diffident orders were carried out with as much alacrity as his own, and undoubtedly more cheerfully. The men respected and to some degree feared Dappling, but they were fond of Sam. They were beginning to respect him, as well; and a few, who had failed him in one way or another, had learned that there were times when he, too, was to be feared.
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